Reflections on 2008: The Year of Cloud Computing

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Reflections on 2008: The Year of Cloud Computing

With both feet firmly planted in 2009, we can now look back at the year 2008 as if it were a wistful dream – that is, if you're like me and you selectively choose your memories. In any case, thanks to the tail end of spendthrift venture capitalism and advertising-supported research and development, 2008 was a banner year from the point of view of web developers.

Accounting for what 2008 brought us, it appears the underlying modus operandi was to make the Web a much more mobile, manageable and powerful platform for web applications. Big players in 2008 were Google, Amazon, Facebook and Yahoo. Microsoft gets honorable mention for Internet Explorer 8 previews and Silverlight 2, but with Vista and the loss of Bill Gates in the captain's chair, it was not quite Microsoft's year.

In general, much of the big wins in 2008 came from browsers and open source technology. Some things we can thank 2008 for:

Cloud Computing – From the consumer's point of view, this means cool applications on the web. From the developers point of view, point no further than Amazon's S3 and Google's App Engine for allowing you to offload the heavy duty backend technology so you can focus on web application innovation. The services allow you to rent servers and its processing power without the fuss of having to constantly replace hard drives manage memory and rebuild servers.

The Mobile Web – Thanks to the fully capable browsers such as Opera's mobile browser or those built into the iPhone and Google's G1 phone, the capabilities of web applications, AJAX and all, were made available to those on the go.

Location Awareness – In part because of the mobile web and embedded device location mechanisms via GPS and wi-fi triangulation, open standards were built to help websites discover user locations and deliver services in corrolation. experience, one where the web knows you, knows where you are, and who you are.

Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect (and the "OpenID Stack") – Logging in to all of your favorite sites can be quite the chore. Facebook and Google's account management tools allow you to log in to multiple sites without having to remember passwords. Even better, you bring along your address book with you, making address book imports and the like obsolete.

Interactive Graphics Without Flash – We're not exactly referring to Silverlight, although Microsoft and NBC used the the technology to stream the Olympics over the web in high definition and it never looked better. HTML 5 brings us two elements with big graphic potential called Canvas and SVG. Designers are just starting to explore just how much animation and graphical filters they can bring to modern browsers without requiring a new plug-in or extension.

JavaScript engines – Once Firefox 3 arrived on our doorsteps touting the fastest browser experience, we were hooked. Maybe in conjunction, or just by mere coincidence, Google and Mozilla started focusing on how to render JavaScript for today's demanding AJAX applications. Google introduced the open-source Chrome browser with the V8 JavaScript-rendering engine and Firefox squeaked out its answer, dubbed Tracemonkey, in beta builds before the year's end.

Webmonkey would like to thank everyone in the industry who rose above the cruft to make 2008 a prosperous year for the web. Now, can someone please fix the banks so we can get back to upgrading our sheep-throwing applications?